The See Also Blog: Develop for Windows

Handling orientation changes and setting preferred orientation in Metro style apps

gclassy — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:01:00 GMT

I have recently been working on a very simple version of the game “Simon” in C# and XAML. The following screenshot shows the game running:

I initially had developed the application without support for orientation. As a result, when the application reflowed, it would crop components of the application off-screen (not desired!). The following screen shot shows this happening in the device simulator.

So, I added some preferences to the application manifest that would indicate the application preferred to be in landscape and also set the preferences in the application startup. To set the preference in the manifest, I clicked on the application manifest in VS11 and then set it to landscape. To set the preference in the application startup, I added the following code to my Main():

Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.AutoRotationPreferences = Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayOrientations.Landscape | Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayOrientations.LandscapeFlipped;

Now that is enough to just lock the display so that the components don’t flip out when the display gets re-oriented. Additionally, the application will launch in landscape, so that’s good and well. However, what if instead, I wanted to handle the case where the device is flipped. The math for doing this is surprisingly simple: width becomes height for each square, and top becomes left and visa versa for the game board squares. First, I need to add an event handler for the OrientationChanged event:

Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.OrientationChanged
+= new Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayPropertiesEventHandler(DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged);

This will cause the function “DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged” to be called when the device is rotated. My handler calls a utility function in the game class which will update the width, height, left, and top values as appropriate to make the tiles reorient as shown in the following screenshot:

Key Takeaways

Make sure that you test your app in the simulator and see what happens when the orientation changes to discover orientation and reflow bugs.

See Also

Quick tip: Toggling the device simulator in Visual Studio on the Windows developer preview

gclassy — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:38:00 GMT

Yesterday I was struggling to figure out how to turn on / turn off the device simulator in the Windows 8 developer preview after discovering an orientation bug in a Metro style app I have been working on. The trick is to click the icon in the build/run dialog as shown in the following screenshot:

This is really handy for testing for orientation bugs. I'll share more on this in a later post!

See Also

Learning Windows Development with Quickstarts and How to’s

gclassy — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 17:39:00 GMT

In coordination with the Windows developer preview release for the Build conference, we quietly have added a few new page types across our content sets and today I’ll talk about two very important ones:

These are important because you can find the specific type of content that you are looking for by searching on the developer centers with the keyword "Quickstart:" or “How to:” and can also get right into the code by keeping an eye out for these keywords in page titles.

Quickstarts

The new quickstart page type is designed to quickly get you introduced to a scenario or feature without getting in to the details but instead focusing on just the essentials. For example, the Adding a flyout quickstart will get you going in just a few minutes from the Building your first Windows Metro style app with JavaScript to having a simple Metro style app with a flyout. Another great example is the Quickstart: Adding an app bar page which will quickly get you going from having a simple Metro style app to having a Metro style app with an app bar on the bottom of the screen.

Check the see also section for some more examples of quickstart documentation.

How to’s

The how to’s that we have begun publishing compliment the Quickstarts by diving deeper into edge cases for scenarios and teaching you how to go beyond the basics. A great example of a list of how to’s can be found in the How to Use Direct3D documentation another great set of how to examples are How to use the App Packaging API and How to Use the Deployment API. These how to’s will get you through the intermediate steps of using your applications when you are working on releasing and deploying your apps. Check the see also section for some more examples of how to documentation.

Takeaways

When you’re looking at search results and browsing the documentation, make sure to pay special attention to the Quickstart and how to documentation because these pages are focused to getting developers solutions to typical problems they will encounter while developing Windows apps.

Viewing the Windows Developer Preview documentation offline

gclassy — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 22:09:30 GMT

Viewing the Windows Developer Preview documentation offline

As many of you have pointed out, the developer experience is a rather significant departure from what has been the traditional documentation approach for Windows. The documentation on the Windows Dev Center has been moving into an encapsulated experience where you follow down a path starting from a big picture and moving deeper into the learning task as you follow links. What this means is that rather than having the traditional table of contents as “branches in the tree” on the left pane of your Window, with “peer” nodes as leaves as seen in the following screenshot:

You instead have the breadcrumb on the top of the page to replace the branches and “peer” nodes rendered within the left pane.

We have received feedback that the experience where you have the TOC is convenient sometimes when you are looking for a reference and, believe it or not, this experience still exists for all of the Windows developer content. To view the TOC and go through the documentation in the more traditional way:

Open Visual Studio
Either press “Ctrl+Alt+F1” or select the menu item Add and Remove Local Help Content from visual studio as shown in the following screenshot:
You should now see the offline help viewer which looks like the following screenshot:
Once in the offline help viewer, you can add and remove the local content. If you have installed the BUILD version of Windows 8 that included Visual Studio, you will have the “Tailored Windows Development” offline help content already which contains the documentation for creating Metro style apps.
Once you have the documentation you need, you can click on the Contents tab from the offline help viewer which should be in the bottom left corner of the window:
Once you have the Contents tab selected, all of the locally installed documentation will be shown. The following screenshot shows how the Windows Metro style App Development documentation appears in the offline viewer:

See Also

What’s new in the Windows Dev Center part 4 (Conclusion): Forums, Samples, and Search

gclassy — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:59:00 GMT

We talked previously about the new look and feel, content integration, and controls for the Windows Dev Center. Also new is what we’ve referred to as “applications” that are components of the dev center. The three key applications are the samples gallery, the forums, and search. Before going deep into what’s new here, I want to thank the MSDN team who has done an amazing job in engineering and designing these updates.

Samples Gallery

The samples gallery has been updated significantly for this release. New to the samples gallery are the following:

New look and feel
300 new samples uploaded across the Windows Desktop Samples Gallery, Windows Metro Style App Gallery, and Windows Hardware Samples Gallery
Improved description and details format
Improved scoping specific to the Windows SDK and library
Improved submission process to ensure that all gallery content is a valid sample.
Addition of the code browser / viewer
Sample Packs – Windows Desktop Sample Pack and Windows Metro Style Apps Sample Pack Integration with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – search and open samples from the new Project dialog

The following screenshot shows the new code browse/view interface. It even supports syntax highlighting!

Forums

The Windows Desktop Developer Forums have been updated to have a single category, we’ll be reorganizing them soon
The Windows Metro Style App Forums have been created to support developers for our new model
The Windows Hardware development forums were updated to support the new features and tools
The forums have a new look and feel
Voting – you can now upvote and downvote posts ala StackOverflow
Related threads – avoid asking the same question twice
Filtering to find posts with code and other metadata about threads
Improvements to core functionality such as the new threaded view

The following image shows the related threads UI. When you begin posting a new thread, the Forums application suggests existing threads that may already address your topic.

Search

We have been continuously making improvements to the Windows Dev Center search. New for the Windows Developer Preview release are:

Improvements to refinements
New look and feel
More information in results UI

Although it’s subtle, the improvements in search should make it much easier to filter through the results that you will get when you perform searches on the dev centers. The following image shows how search reveals whether a forum result is answered or has responses:

So this pretty much concludes our short post series about what’s new in the dev center. Thank you for reading!

See Also

Windows Dev Center Updates for 09.16.2011: BUILD and Windows 8

gclassy — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:45:00 GMT

This week, we launched the Windows Developer Preview at the BUILD conference. This release shows the new user interface of Windows 8, adds functionality for developers, and also introduces a new programming model and language enhancements. Needless to say, it has been an exciting week!

New Dev Center Updates

We have been going over the enhancements for the developer center separately in the 3 posts so far covering:

We've got plenty more to update you on about the changes, but it will take a few posts for us to cover everything.

BUILD Presentations

There have been tons of great presentations at BUILD and some of the big keynotes for the desktop from the first day of BUILD have been:

The BUILD keynote presentation with Chris Jones,Steven Sinofsky,Antoine Leblonde,Mike Angiulo,Julie Larson-Green
Jensen Harris Walks Us Through the Windows 8 UI
The new platform for Metro style apps - Aleš Holeček

You can watch all of the BUILD videos online at Channel 9.

Top Resources from the Dev Center

There is a lot of content on the Windows Dev Center but there are definitely some pages that we expected to get more traffic than others and a couple resources that are really important right now.

The Windows Developer Preview Windows 8 guide gives you a great introduction to Windows 8. Windows 8 Guide XPS / Windows 8 Guide PDF

If you're looking for community support for the Windows developer preview, there is a forum that we have created for this very purpose, the Windows Developer Preview General OS Questions forum. There are other forums - Windows Metro style apps development forum, Windows desktop app development forum, and Windows hardware development forum.

We have some great samples for the preview and have created some filters so that you can see just the samples you're looking for. The Windows Metro style app samples, the Windows hardware samples, and the Windows desktop samples.

Getting started is a key resource on the Dev center: Get started with Desktop app programming, Get started with Metro style app development, Get Started with Windows hardware development. We will be continuously updating the developer content and we'll make sure to highlight additional key resouces moving forward.

If you're looking to download the Windows desktop developer preview make sure that you calculate a SHA-1 hash of the ISO to make sure that the download wasn't corrupted. To do this:

Download the file checksum calculator utility from Microsoft.
Run the checksum utility passing in the path to the downloaded ISO and the SHA-1 flag. (for example: fciv c:\users\gclassy\desktop\WindowsDeveloperPreview-32bit-English.iso -sha1)
Verify that the SHA-1 checksum matches the value that we have on the Windows Developer Preview Downloads page for the ISO you downloaded. When I ran the code against the 32-bit ISO, the following output came from the program, indicating my checksum is valid.

//
// File Checksum Integrity Verifier version 2.05.
//
4e0698bbabe01ed27582c9fc16ad21c4422913cc c:\users\gclassy\desktop\windowsdeveloperpreview-32bit-english.iso

Social Media and Other Cross-technology Communities

We've been engaging on the Windows Developers Twitter account and we also have a Windows Developer Facebook page that you can Like and receive updates from us.

Closing Thoughts and Feedback

Let us know how we're doing, it's been a busy week which has afforded us little time to sit back and think about what's working and what's not. Drop some comments if you have a strong opinion - positive or negative. Thanks!

See Also

What's new in the Windows Dev Center part 3: New center controls

gclassy — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:48:00 GMT

So we've talked a bit about the new look and feel as well as the library. These additions to the Windows Dev Center have been part of a "bring up" that creates a more integrated experience that matches the look and feel of Metro style apps. We've also added some rather cool functionality to the center through some new controls, most notably the new rating and feedback control and the video control.

New Rating and Feedback control

The new rating and feedback control appears at the bottom of every reference page that is surfaced through the Windows Dev Center. The control looks like this:

When you click the control, you get more options for specifying what the feedback that you're giving pertains to as shown in the following screenshot:

I'll bet you're wondering what happens when you fill out the form and click submit :) Well, the feedback gets stored into a database and the writer receives the feedback directly. With the aggregated feedback, the writer can update the topic to address your concerns and the documentation gets better!

We're really excited about this new control because it will help us to create better documentation when you see something that's wrong.

New Video Control

The new video control is based on HTML5 and lets us embed videos within the documentation. We prioritized producing good code and accurate documentation for BUILD but in the future you'll hopefully see the control used in our docs. The following screenshot shows how it might look in docs once we have produced and embedded video:

We're working (as I write, in fact!) on getting some videos together for the new documentation and hopefully you will see them embedded within the developer documentation in the coming weeks!

See Also

What's new in the Windows Dev Center part 2: MSDN Library integration

gclassy — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 18:19:00 GMT

In our first What's new post, we discussed the new look and feel of the Windows Dev Center. This experience would only be partially complete if all the documentation was presented in an older style. So, we worked closely with MSDN to improve the way that the "library" content appears on the developer center. To compare and contrast, here is the older developer center experience:

This evolved into a "lightweight" experience which simplified the table of contents to address feedback that we were getting from customers that the table of contents was getting too long (vertically):

The lightweight experience evolved again into the experience we have today which moves the parent table of contents elements into what we've been calling the "breadcrumb" which appears on the top of the site and moving peer elements to the left side of the site:

Note that the navigation links on the top of the site no longer change to the library links. This way, you know that you're staying locked into development resources for Windows rather than developer resources all up for Microsoft.

Some related changes have been critical to improving the experience in content such as the ability to integrate video into content (content coming soon!) and the new ratings control (we'll talk about this in another post). But at a high level this was one of the most significant updates that we made in the center for BUILD.

See Also

Update:

Note that you still can use the "classic" look and feel for any content that appears in the MSDN library. First, go to the MSDN library and navigate to the section of interest. Next click the gear icon in the top right section of the page:

Next, change the preferred view to classic:

Thanks James for asking :)

Update 2:

Jeff Braaten wrote a great blog post on how he and his team engineered the integrated library experience, or, "An MSDN Library for the Windows Dev Center". And also pointed out that the major benefit of the "Lightweight" UI for MSDN made a huge difference in how much real estate was available to the content area.

A few Windows developer preview keyboard shortcuts

gclassy — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:25:00 GMT

I'm sure that a number of developers have been downloading the Windows developer preview. With the preview comes new (unofficial) shortcuts. The following list are the ones we're aware of:

Key	Action
Windows logo key+Y	Temporarily look at the desktop
Windows logo key+Enter	Launches Narrator
Windows logo key+F	File Search
Windows logo key+I	Settings
Windows logo key+K	Connections
Windows logo key+H	Share
Windows logo key+Q	Search
Windows logo key+W	Settings search
Windows logo key+Z	Flip open apps
Windows logo key+C	Toggle control

What's new in the Windows Dev Center? (Part 1)

gclassy — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:18:00 GMT

Today, we launched the new version of the Windows Dev Center. This is a major release that includes a number of very awesome updates:

New look and feel
Content integration with the library
New forums
New samples gallery
New download experience
New social communities
Improvements to search
Support for video embedded within content

There are probably a few other things that we can't remember in the chaos that has been BUILD. But, we're up, and we wanted to show you a few of the finishing touches we put on our Windows developer preview release.

For now, we'll just show you the new look and feel of the homepage:

Notice that we've now integrated what was previously the Windows Hardware Developer Center content with the Windows Desktop (Client) Developer Center content and have made room for the brand new Metro style apps content. This has been a HUUUGEE effort that involved moving lots of varied content into a single location. We hope that you enjoy developing with Windows 8 in the coming months! More to come!

Windows desktop developer center updates for 08.26.2011

gclassy — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 17:51:00 GMT

We're currently getting ready for the upcoming content releases but we do have a few new things to share.

Social and Windows Developer Communities

We recently integrated with all up Windows group on Facebook. To access and like the Developer pages, click on the "More Social" or "What's new" link then select developer from the tabs that appear. Clicking the "like" icon will sign you up for Windows developer announcements that are made on Facebook. You can also still subscribe to us over the Windows desktop developer twitter account.

Forum Renames

This week, we renamed a number of the Windows desktop developer forums. If you're used to the old names, the changes are very minor. The following list summarizes the updates to names:

Old Name	New Name
Application Compatibility for Windows Development	Application Compatibility for Windows Desktop Development
Developing Applications with Power Management	Developing Windows Desktop Applications with Power Management
Development for Windows Accessibility and Automation	Windows Desktop Development for Accessibility and Automation
DirectShow Development	DirectShow Development
General Windows Development Issues	General Windows Desktop Development Issues
Ink, Windows Touch, and Tablet PC Development	Windows Desktop Development for Ink, Touch, and Tablet PC
Media Foundation Development	Media Foundation Development for Windows Desktop
Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)	Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)
Network Monitor	Windows Desktop Network Monitor
Optical Platform Discussion	Windows Desktop Optical Platform Discussion
Peer-to-Peer Networking	Peer-to-Peer Networking for Windows Desktop
Security for Applications in Microsoft Windows	Application Security for Windows Desktop
Sidebar Gadget Development	Windows Desktop Sidebar Gadget Development
User Interface development for Windows	User Interface development for Windows Desktop
Visual C++ General	Visual C++ General
Visual C++ Language	Visual C++ Language
Windows Debugging	Windows Desktop Debugging
Windows Desktop Search Development	Windows Desktop Search Development
Windows Desktop Search Help	Windows Desktop Search Help
Windows Filtering Platform (WFP)	Windows Filtering Platform (WFP)
Windows Imaging Component	Windows Imaging Component (WIC)
Windows Perfmon and Diagnostic tools	Windows Desktop Perfmon and Diagnostic tools
Windows Pro-Audio Application Development	Windows Desktop Pro-Audio Application Development
Windows Ribbon Development	Windows Desktop Ribbon Development
Windows SDK	Windows Desktop SDK
Windows Vista Wireless SDK	Windows Desktop Vista Wireless SDK
Windows WDK and Driver Development	Windows Hardware WDK and Driver Development
Windows Web Services API (webservices.dll)	Windows Desktop Web Services API (webservices.dll)
Windows XP Wireless SDK	Windows XP Wireless SDK
Winsock Kernel (WSK)	Windows Desktop Winsock Kernel (WSK)

You can see the full current list of Windows desktop developer forums on MSDN now - feel free to let us know what you think about the current list of forums.

Building Windows 8

The Building Windows 8 team released a new blog post covering updates and improvements to the file explorer and file operations experience. This has been their most commented on post yet, it's great to see the excitement building from Windows enthusiasts.

How-To Topics

We have mentioned this before, but we've been hard at work on creating plenty of How-to topics that give you quick solutions to specific problems. The following link shows an example:

How-To Topics for UI Automation Providers

In the future, we'll try and create a search query that finds all the how-to topics but the right metadata has not yet been published.

See Also

[Offtopic] New PC Build

gclassy — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 16:43:00 GMT

Some people spend their time and money on cars, fiending after the new models and tweaking their existing vehicle to ink a few more HP out of it. I don't much care about cars, I drive a Lincoln TownCar that I bought for $800 at auction, but I run and build PCs like enthusiasts at Hot August Nights do hotrods.

It's been over two years since I last upgraded my home PC so I figured it's just about time for me to rebuild. When replacing a PC I usually wait until I can get a computer that will be roughly twice as fast as my previous. I have a feeling this build will be at least that :)

The "Old" Machine

This is what my current laptop looks like (images from Geek.com).

My current computer is an ASUS G51VX-A1 [geek.com], one of the flagship "Republic of Gamers" laptops and it has been a blast to own. It was the first gaming laptop I have ever owned and was an amazing buy at around $1500. Quad core Q9000 processor, GTX 260m, etc. It also has some fun bells and whistles like a blindingly bright backlit keyboard, startup animation, and thumpingly loud subwoofer built into the PC. When the machine came out, it cost less than a MacBook Pro and was basically 2-3x as fast in terms of graphical power and 2x as fast in terms of processing power. Yes, it plays Crysis, with AA turned on, at higher resolutions than 1024x768. I upgraded the machine to an SSD in 2010 and it has felt plenty fast and snappy ever since. In fact, my laptop from 2009 flat out smokes the workstation that I was provisioned for my work PC and my work PC is supposedly a top of the line HP. The only drawbacks of the machine were heat and power - the laptop struggled to get much over 90 minutes of battery life and saved me from needing to heat my apartment. I recently hooked up two monitors to this PC though and it seems to be having trouble with ultra-high resolutions like 3840x1200 which I am running across dual screens.

The New PC

So... it's time. My new build - the important bits - will consist of:

Some of the components are a little over the top (case, Revodrive) but I tried to create a balanced value/enthusiast PC. Shipped, the PC will cost a little over $1500 which is pretty good considering the performance I expect to get out of the machine. In planning out the PC I had first created a "crazy build" where I went about one tier under the fastest machine I could build (this build would have cost me ~$2500 but had a GeForce GTX 580 and 6-core i7 ), then I created a "value" machine where I went and found the best bang for the buck components (many which were the hot components of 2010 like the Phenom II X6) and then went ahead and found something in the middle. All of the components I got are enthusiast components, just the "budget" enthusiast components. For example, the Revo has a number of faster and newer models but I opted out. The Revo is still marginally faster than most SSD drives and does not occupy a SATA port which was what really drove my decision there. At any rate, all these components are ridiculous compared to anything I have used before so I'm very excited!

Some options that I really fought over:

12GB 9-9-9- vs 8GB 7-9-7 timing PC3-12800 memory

This could make a big impact both ways. In VMs the extra memory could help. The faster memory would translate to reduced load times. I opted for more memory and slower timing, and I think this was one place where I might have been better off going with the highest end versus mid-high-end. The price difference was pretty significant too, the faster timed memory costs about twice as much as the slower timed memory.

Nvidia vs. AMD

Ever since the days of 3DFX vs. Nvidia, I was first a 3DFX fan and later an Nvidia fan. I tried to set emotions aside though, the ATI - err AMD - option has more memory which will be better for me because I'm running at high resolutions. The motherboard I picked also is CrossFireX which is AMD. I have been weary of AMD cards paired with Intel but I don't think this really is an issue.

Conclusions and Comparisons Old to New

I just pulled some random synthetic benchmarks for the components to see just how much faster my new build is going to be. These numbers aren't necessarily representative of how real world performance will be between the machines but could give you an idea.

Component	Old PC	New PC	Difference
CPU	Intel Q9000 3003 PassMark	Intel 2600k 9,910 PassMark	Roughly 3x as Fast
Graphics	GeForce 260M 4911 3dMark in Vantage	Radeon 6970 28017 3Dmarks in Vantage	Roughly 5x as Fast
Memory	4GB 800-mhz SDRAM This is PC2-6400 ~7.5 GB/s	12GB 1600-mhz This is PC3-12800 ~18.3 GB/s	Roughly 2x as Fast
Disk	Kingston SSDNow V+ Seq Read: 242MB/Sec Seq Write: 167MB/Sec 4K Read: 19.6 4K Write: 13.7	RevoDrive SSD Seq Read: 390MB/s Seq Write: 285MB/s 4K Read: 23MB/s 4K Write: 63MB/s	Less than 2x as fast in most cases

My new machine will probably be more than twice as fast as my older laptop. I'm now really excited. We'll see how the build goes after the components arrive and I get back from vacation next week!

Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 08.19.2011

gclassy — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:16:00 GMT

Looking back
We wrote a post summarizing updates to the Windows Desktop developer center in 2010-2011.

The Building Windows 8 Blog
The Windows team has started a dialog with developers and customers to talk about how we are creating Windows and how we have reached the point where we are at today. Read the following posts from Steven Sinofsky to get up to speed on the Windows 8 backstory so far.

Going Native: The C++ Rennaissance

That's it for this week! Hope you all have a great weekend.

See Also

Looking back, a summary of key improvements to the Windows Desktop developer center in 2010-2011

gclassy — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:27:46 GMT

It's been a little over a year since I started working on the Windows Desktop developer center and boy has it been hard work! We have delivered a number of exciting changes to the center and as I have referenced these changes rather randomly, I thought it would be interesting to summarize them all. But, before we dive into this, consider where we started: the Windows Developer center launch for Windows 7. This release added the existing look and feel to the center along with a number of content refreshes to reflect the new APIs and features introduced with Windows 7.

After the Windows 7 release, we drove the following content updates and changes to the center:

We published Hilo and the DirectCompute lecture series.
Shortly after the Hilo release, we made significant updates to the Power Management learning path and the Accessibility learning path.
We added the Browse by resource pages to the center.
Updates to social - we started the Windows Developer Twitter account and our old Facebook page, which become the new Windows Developer Facebook tab
We updated search for the center to address scoping to desktop development.
We kicked off the Windows Desktop developer center reorganization effort.
We updated the Windows Desktop developer guide.

And here we are today! We're heads down on reorganizing our content still but hopefully in the coming weeks we will begin delivering updates to make our content more discoverable and better for getting developers coding!

See Also

Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 08.12.2011

gclassy — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:34:23 GMT

This week, we launched our new Facebook pages and we made a few tweaks to the forums. We're working hard on some updates that we can't discuss in detail yet for a number of reasons but understand that we have big plans for the center in the coming months and we can't wait to hear what you think once the major updates are in place.

Facebook Pages

The changes to the Facebook pages are a little tricky to understand at first so here are a few notes. First, the way that our new pages work are there are tabs for each audience (everyone, developer, student, and business). In order to receive updates for Developer content, first start on the What's new tab for Windows. Once here, select the Developer section and click like. On the developer tab for what's new, you can access the Facebook wall for Windows developers, can coordinate with other developers on events like BUILD, and can see the latest content that we're sharing on Facebook. Secondly, there is an additional tab, More Social, that currently contains a few links and feeds that are relevant to Windows developers but that in the longer term will have more comprehensive sources for content. We're taking baby steps for now, but once we start seeing traction in the Facebook communities, we'll start running with discussions through the pages.

Forum Updates

We have been struggling a little bit with the updates to forums that we started last week. Many of the forums are being retired and once they are, the forums will have sticky notes added to them in order to move the communities temporarily until we have struck together the new organization and breakdown for Windows developer forums. Bear with us, this will be a little confusing for the time being but it will be much better than it currently is once we're done. Please let us know if a forum that you were active in has been shut down and doesn't have a good redirect link in the sticky notes.

See Also

New Windows Developers Facebook Page

gclassy — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 16:31:00 GMT

We have just released our new Facebook page that fits into the larger Windows branded Facebook presence.

There are two tabs for developers, the More Social tab and the What’s New! tab.

The following mockup shows how the More Social tab looks. This tab gives you updates from around the web and official Microsoft channels for developers:

The following image shows the What's New tab. This tab has the Windows developer wall and announcments for Windows Developers:

Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 08.05.2011

gclassy — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:34:00 GMT

This week we have had a couple minor updates to the center and have some updates to the forums on the way along with a new Facebook page that is hopefully coming next week.

Forum Updates

We have been working on making some updates to the Windows Desktop forums that will make it easier to link to and find the right forum for developer solutions. Put concisely, we'll be closing some of the forums and then moving all of the forums to a single category. Our belief is that having fewer forums and ensuring that we have relevant forums to what developers are interested in doing will be helpful for developers to more accurately and quickly get a solution.

Surface on the Windows Desktop Developer Center

We have migrated some of the Surface content into the Windows Desktop developer center. This has largely been in part because the new Surface 2.0 SDK lets you target Windows 7. In other words, you can make apps using the Surface SDK, compile them for Windows, then run them on Windows. This is a big deal because the Surface 2.0 SDK ships with some killer multitouch controls that can be used for building some very engaging applications. If you want to get started coding with Surface, download the Surface SDK and check out the shipping samples.

C++ Links from Around the Web

See Also

10 Books that could Make you a Better C++ Programmer

gclassy — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 19:12:00 GMT

I just recently read a post by Programming Zen on 10 recent books that will make you a better developer. I have a few books to add to the list although these may not be as recent and that are focused to C++... making my list really 10 classic books that will make you a better C++ developer J. Some of these books have multiple editions and the older ones can be bought cheaper and usually don’t have significant revisions. There’s one exception that I can think of, Deitel and Deitel (D&D). My copy was the 5^th edition of the Deitel and Deitel book but from what I’ve heard, it fixed some voice issues and they have introduced lots of new material with each edition to address C++ and STL updates. Finally, if you’re looking for our list of Microsoft Press books for C++ developers, we have a great one on the developer center and I’ll exclude those from this list as this one is more personal and focused to books that have influenced me along the way as a developer. Here’s my list, in no particular order with exception for The Pragmatic Programmer, my dog-eared copy still serves as my developer mantra.

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

While I was a Java developer at a startup (my pre-Microsoft times), my manager/mentor gave me this book and it was a great read that I have revisited over the course of my career. This book is the kind of book that applies in one way while you are developing as a new programmer and in a completely different way as you become more seasoned. For this reason, this book makes the top of my list and I’m surprised it didn’t make the top of the Programming Zen list.

Effective C++ and More Effective C++ by Scott Meyers

Scott Meyers has created some amazing books about development in C++. These books have taught me many techniques to create much better code that is cleaner and less buggy. Meyers’ best practices will help to turn a rookie into a much more seasoned developer and learning and understanding the reasoning behind why Meyers makes the book an effective tool for stepping up your C++. The other thing about Meyers’ books is that following his guidance will reduce defects in your code immediately.

Practical Programming in C++ by Steve Oualline

This book was a great read. The voice that comes through makes it easier to grok the concepts that Oualine covers in the text. O’Reilly does an amazing job of editing and I love all their books, but this one really sticks out as a go-to text for the 80% foundation of what makes a good C++ programmer.

The C++ Cookbook by D. Ryan Stephens, Christopher Diggins, Jonathan Turkanis, and Jeff Cogswell

I’ll start off admitting that I have a slight bias for the C++ cookbook because I had the pleasure of working with one of its authors, Christopher Diggins, a few years ago and he was a brilliant programmer. Disclosures aside, this book is primarily a collection of techniques and shortcuts that will reduce your time to completion. As with the rest of O’Reilly books, the editors do a fantastic job of controlling the writer’s voice making this book also a very pleasant read.

C++ How to Program by Deitel and Deitel

Many readers may scoff that this book is really a beginner’s book because it was probably the first book they picked up on C++ programming. There’s a reason it’s so popular: the authors do an amazing job communicating concepts and this is probably the best book hands down on foundational C++ skills. This book makes my list because it creates good programmers from beginners.

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Gamma et. All

Design patterns are the apex of thinking for creating code that is reusable and familiar to other developers. The 23 patterns shared in the text, also known as the “Gang of Four” book, have been talked about for decades now and will be talked about by architects and seasoned developers for the foreseeable future. This is a book that brings intermediate developers into the ranks of masters and helps them to understand their language and reflect on elegant solutions to software problems. Read this book when you are ready for it.

Code Complete by Steve McConnell

Steve McConnell’s book, the first Microsoft Press book on my list, sits on the desk of many engineers at Microsoft and in some circles serves as an employee handbook for coding style. Required reading for coders in some of our teams, it serves as a great example for how to create legible code that in the long run will save developers time.

Writing Secure Code by Michael Howard and Steve Lipner

Security is a best practice, right? For those engineers with Code Complete, this book oftentimes sits right next to it. In many ways, this book is a complimentary book to another title, Thread Modeling, but in my experience does a better to illustrate security from the developer’s perspective. Writing secure code addresses the ways to STRIDE model and thinking about security from an engineering and coding perspective makes this book essential for developers coding anything that can have an attack surface.

The Art of Computer Programming - Donald Knuth

This book series is probably the most famous CS book series of all time – if you ask developers who learned at the dawn of modern CS. I was handed down my copy (copies? it’s like 4 giant books) from an older programmer while I was still learning and college and the theories were way over my head. Knuth invented his own machine language for the series and demonstrates classic algorithms in it, an amazing feat in itself. If you are looking for a quick way to become a better programmer, this is not the series you are looking for. However, if you want to gain a better understanding of computer science theory and can bear through the hardcore, the Knuth series is all you need. The Knuth books are very scientific but at their core is the foundation for solving complex problems with algorithms and for this reason it can transform your thinking about programming.

The C++ Programming Language and by Bjarne Stroustrup

I can’t in good conscious give a list of C++ programming books without including the C++ creator’s manual. This book is a very interesting reflection on the choices that were made in the creation of the language and also serves as a reference for the C++ programming language and STL and also reveals the reasons that you should use the language as intended. This book can transform a person from a C++ coder into an individual who really uses and chooses the C++ language for its strengths. If nothing else, this is a fascinating look at C++ from the 10,000 foot to microscopic perspective.

Here's the list from Programming Zen, with exception to debugging with DDD/Eclipse and the Agile books, these books introduce many great best practices and will help you become a better developer regardless of which language you are coding in:

1. Introduction to Algorithms, Third Edition

OK, this is cheating a little. “Introduction to Algorithms” is both a classic and a book on everyone’s list. However, I opted to include it because not everyone knows that it was recently (September 2009) released in its third edition. The book received a major upgrade to the existing content and exercises, as well as including new, modern algorithms. Any programmer working through this book, or revisiting it, will learn valuable, foundational knowledge.

2. The Annotated Turing

Alan Turing wrote a classic paper in 1936 with the title: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“. It was a paper on Turing machines and the limits of computability, which had a major impact on computer science and the development of the computer you are reading this post on. Every programmer/computer scientist should get ahold of this paper and read it. Unfortunately, it isn’t exactly easy to grasp if you are not used to reading research papers. In “The Annotated Turing”, Petzold does a marvelous job of dissecting the paper (and its errata), providing ample explanations and background information over 18 chapters (360 pages vs 36 of the original paper). It manages to be rigorous while still being accessible. If this book doesn’t arouse your interest in computer science, chances are nothing will.

3. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests

This book takes two fundamental pillars of modern software development, Object-Oriented Design and Test-Driven Development, and clearly illustrates how to apply the best practices of each to build and maintain complex software. I don’t know of many developers who couldn’t learn something new about TDD in the context of OOP from this book. A must read.

4. Clean Code

While on the subject of Agile development, I can’t help but recommend “Clean Code” by Uncle Bob. It compliments “Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests” perfectly by focusing on how to improve and refractor code to get rid of code smells. You can think of it as a very succinct version of Code Complete 2, with a strong focus on Agile craftsmanship. The examples, as per the previous book, are in Java but that shouldn’t be much of an issue for the open-minded developer.

5. Leading Lean Software Development: Results Are not the Point

Lean principles deriving from the Lean manufacturing world have been effectively translated and adapted to the field of software development. This book explains how to lead a team to success through lean software development in detail to team leaders and mentors. Having obtained a Lean Six Sigma yellow belt many years ago, this book definitely gave me a few flashbacks. If you are not familiar with the concepts presented, you’ll definitely find it food for thought. Building software requires far more than just writing quality code, and the techniques presented here are valuable, even if you don’t fully buy into this methodology.

6. Growing Software

While on the subject of leadership, if you are in charge of software development at a small company or startup, you want to read this book. My interest in this title came from the fact that its author (Louis Testa) works as a Senior Engineering Manager at Galois, a company that uses Haskell as their technological advantage (and hired Don Stewart of Haskell fame). “Growing Software” delivered on my expectations and is full of hands-on advice on how to deal with the whole workflow surrounding the creation of software from the idea all the way to the sale and support of a product.

7. The Art of Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse

Debugging is an invaluable skill and one that is often left out from introductory programming books. Being able to effectively debug code is what separate professionals from beginners, and productive programmers from frustrated ones. This book is ruthlessly practical with many advanced techniques for debugging on Linux/Unix. It’s well worth its price in my opinion.

8. Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals

Assuming you already have a decent understanding of relational databases, and are not too scared of mathematics, this book will really bring your knowledge of how databases work to the next level, in turn improving the design, schema evolution, and SQL queries you’ll create afterwards.

9. Programming Collective Intelligence

If you are building web applications that do more than simply CRUD operations on your data, you’ll want to read this book (with examples in Python). The motivated, intermediate developer will learn how to efficiently solve complex problems related to machine learning and intelligent web algorithms from this book. It’s a very accessible introduction to tough subjects and one of the most interesting books I’ve read in some time.

10. Coders at work

To conclude this list, I wanted to include a book that’s aimed at showing programmers how some of the best programmers and computer scientists do their work. I previously enjoyed Founders at Work, and this version about programming is just as good. It’s inspiring, fun to read, and rich in insight and advice.

See Also

Books for Windows Developers
10 Recent Books that will make you a better developer [Programming Zen]

Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 07.29.2011

gclassy — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 17:17:00 GMT

Use This Not This

We wrote a brief post on APIs that have changed since Vista that may affect applications. This post was created based on input from our support team around common gotchas that they are seeing from developers and is really targeted to legacy applications.

Developer Center Updates

Nothing significant has changed recently with the desktop developer center although we are working hard on a new Facebook presence. We should have more details announced next week.

Going Native: The C++ Renaissance

This week, Channel 9 launched the GoingNative channel. This new channel will focus on how developers can use C++ as a language tool for creating great applications and the best practices for native development. The following links summarize new content in the C++ development world.

Kate Gregory Blogs about GoingNative on Channel 9
#AltDevBlogADay wrote about alternatives to malloc and new
The Visual C++ Developer Center refreshed its Developing Windows Applications in C++ page

See Also

Use this not this: APIs that changed for Vista and later

gclassy — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 17:02:00 GMT

The recommendations this week have come in from the support team and the following list is things that aren't recommend for targeting versions of Windows later than Vista but that developers occasionally will use.

Internet Connection Sharing APIs

Don't use the Internet Connection Sharing APIs in versions of Windows later than Vista. The APIs do not work as documented.

WSARecv / SetSystemTimeAdjustment

After Windows Vista, the following APIs have changed and can confuse folks:

API	Notes
WSARecv	After Windows Vista, the value lpNumberOfBytesRecvd may be incorrect when used with IOCP. Not quite the best use this not this, but, if you are doing HTTP (e.g. REST) with C++, you should be using the WinHTTP API.
SetSystemTimeAdjustment	After Windows Vista, this API will ignore any adjustments less than 15. The following KB article helps explain when SetSystemTimeAdjustment doesn't work in Vista and later.

FindFirstVolumeMountPoint and VolumeMountPaths API

FindFirstVolumeMountPoint has some security limitations so some people recommend using the GetVolumePathName function instead which is more robust.

See Also

Use This Not This

Windows Desktop Developer Center Updates for 07.22.2011

gclassy — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:27:12 GMT

Over the course of this week, we have been working hard on some new social developer content that may or may not be launching next week :) A reminder, we make announcements to the Windows Developer Twitter Account and Windows Developer Facebook Page follow us if you want to get our announcements. We'll be sure to share links to the new content once it's live over these channels and the blog. We have also continued driving the TOC changes for the learn tab on MSDN.

Earlier this week I shared some insights into how the Windows developer content team has thought about learning in the past. The anecdotal recommendation for learning with MSDN is to:

Avoid the reference topics while you are getting started
Check the See Also links for more related topics and more comprehensive guides
When you find errors, Submit Feedback to Microsoft about the documentation bug so we fix it.

Not very many content updates to the center have gone live but the following links summarize the cool stuff that we've heard about for Windows developers:

Windows Internals - Hooks - A blog post about hacking Windows for developers
Build Conference - We can't emphasize this enough, Build is a big deal and we're very excited (we so excited). You can also follow the @bldwin account to receive the build conference announcements and offers.

Just in case you haven't seen the 'Windows 8' preview video and press release...

See Also

Challenges Developers Face while Developing with Microsoft, or, How Microsoft expects Developers to learn.

gclassy — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:01:00 GMT

After publishing a recent post, I got some feedback from developers that I have seen a number of times. “What is up with the scarce documentation that always shows up when I end up on MSDN?” This is the common plight of the Microsoft developer – they have just started developing or are in the middle of a project, they search for an API expecting comprehensive guidance, and they get a page that looks like it was a placeholder.

The problem for developers, summarized
Microsoft docs are scarce, and rarely cover end-to-end scenarios. Search results typically turn up reference pages that from time to time aren’t very awesome.A good example of this (that I wrote, rushing to meet DOJ requirements) can be seen here: IContactProperties::DeleteLabels Method. This is an example of a topic that covers the bare minimum, “F” level quality.

The problem for writers, summarized
Programming writers typically are responsible for as much content as they can take on… with a little more added on for good measure. For example, while I was writing, I was responsible for around 2000-4000 topics that were either authored, inherited, or generated. These map 1:1 to public APIs that ship in SDKs and must meet certain minimum standards for every topic. This means that many APIs, despite rarely being used by developers, must be documented. As such, writers try to identify the important APIs and dedicate more time to them while focusing their best efforts on the most used APIs.

The source of the problem
As a symptom of every API being documented, many of the placeholder pages have precedence in search because the title and heading are exact matches for a search term. This can yield landing pages and entry points for developers into the “bad” docs. As such, it seems like much of the stuff that should be documented isn’t sufficiently documented at all and this situation creates the problem for developers.

For programmer writers, the breadth of content that must be covered makes it difficult to address everything as well as they would like. A lot of the time, writer’s work gets churned with API changes and the 200-300 APIs that a writer documented for a release with meticulous care were changed so that the documentation is out of sync or out of date and must be redone on a very tight schedule.

The “solution”
To address these issues, Microsoft has come up with a number of solutions over the years. The first is to use carefully structured documentation. Developer documentation typically is authored within the latest content template that standards bodies across Microsoft try to adhere to. When I was a writer, the content was organized as follows:
• About
• Programming Guide
• Reference

We go another step and specify how the content should be authored so that things appear consistently from topic to topic. The template when I was a writer was something similar to:
• Syntax
• Parameters
• Return Value
• Remarks
• Examples
• See Also

By carefully organizing our content and structuring the documentation we create a few opportunities for throwing a bone to developers when they are learning a new SDK, API, or scenario. For example, a developer could link to a sample or programming guide topic for an API if there isn’t an example on the actual reference page. We also try to get “coverage” for topics prioritized around how much we expect developers to use a topic. We also have sophisticated tools for sharing content (and code!) across topics and for validating that our code builds and works.

Taking the time to organize our content and publish it as we do is great and all, but we still don’t educate developers on our content structure so developers still don’t know how to find the content they need to get to – almost inevitable with their own deadlines looming and things not working as they expect.

How Microsoft expects developers to use the documentation

So, now on to the point of my post. The following is how Microsoft expects developers to use the documentation given the structure of our content and how we learn internally:

1) Read the About content to learn the architecture of an API
2) Determine your scenarios and find them in the Programming Guide or download a sample from/with the SDK and get started with that
3) If developers encounter challenges or need details of an API, they can click the reference to get deeper information about a specific API

My best example from content that I have authored is this:
1) Learn about Windows Touch, Architectural Overview
2) Choose the right approach to touch for you
3) Code something simple as demonstrated in “Detecting and Tracking Multiple Touch Points”

At this point I expected the developer (reader) to have a basic understanding of what Windows Touch is and how it works in code. The developer should have a project that works and does something (draw different colored touch points on their screen) and should be thinking about how they can use this in a larger context.

The reality is that this story isn’t as complete as we would like it to be. Writers aren’t forced to author in a specific structure and documentation can vary from team to team.

Additional solutions from MSDN and Microsoft

Structuring our content as we do hasn't worked as well as we expected. So, we also have developer centers such as the Windows Desktop Developer Center which pretty much function as a band-aid for the missing or confusing structure that exist within MSDN. Centers work pretty much as indexes and alternative tables of content to the large ones that exist within the MSDN library. I'm currently working to make sure that for Windows, we get better with this and I'm constantly hard at work on improving the content and organization and enabling writers to improve their content and reveal the best topics using the developer center. I'm also working on documenting "how to learn with MSDN" and this article is a brief dump of some of my brainstorming. The following notes will later be lengthened and surfaced through the center.

Some pro tips for learning
Find the “Programming Guide”. This content does not exist for every documented API group, but if you can find, it the programming guide should be a goldmine of information for you.

Avoid reference topics if you are getting started. This is referred to as RTFM (read the fun manual) in certain circles… But it’s true. If you jump in with just the APIs, which oftentimes are rushed to be published, it can be difficult to understand what’s going on and rookie mistakes and gotchas are easy to encounter. Make sure to keep an eye out for Note and dig into the remarks section of APIs for gotchas. We (programmer writers) try to make it easy to avoid making the same mistakes that we made while learning how to develop the samples that we code and ship.

In reference topics, Check the See Also section for links to more useful content, especially if the topic seems particularly bare. This is an opportunity sometimes overlooked by writers, but with a reasonable frequency writers will link to the guidance topics and howto topics from the See Also section of the documentation. This content is at the bottom of virtually every page, so don’t forget to scroll down and check it out.

Finally, when you find errors, Submit Feedback to Microsoft about the documentation bug so we fix it.

Thanks for reading, send me some comments or horror stories, I love to bring the feedback to our teams because we can oftentimes get wrapped up in the way we expect customers to work when in reality they work so differently from what we expect. If my thinking on how developers learn is a little too far out there, let me know too so I can adjust to how you guys really learn!

See Also

Windows Developer Center Updates for 07.15.2011

gclassy — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 17:20:25 GMT

This week, we made some progress on reorganizing the developer center and we had some great discussions with developers about what is and isn't working with MSDN documentation.

Upcoming Updates to the Learn Tab content

From a post earlier this week...

The following is an intermediate revision to the TOC, there will be more to come as we keep getting better at this!

The real goal of this reorganization is to make it more clear what sort of content you will encounter while browsing through the learn content on the developer center. For example, when you click on the Learn by Feature section, all of the features that we have learning paths for will be made available.

Discussions with Developers about MSDN as a learning tool

In some talks with (real, actual, Windows) developers that I had earlier this week I was reminded of a common dilemma that developers face when developing for Windows:

It's really hard to find the guidance documentation but it's really easy to find the reference documentation - as a result, despite the guidance being what devs want, the reference is what they always find.

I'll dive a little deeper into this today but next week I'll follow up with more details and more thinking that I have had about this, how we can fix it, and what we can do until we have a solution. At the heart of the problem is the reality that the bulk of the documentation on MSDN is reference. This is an artifact of what programming writers know closely as the consent decree - the result of the DOJ lawsuit that mandated that all public facing code be documented to level the playing field for Microsoft's platforms. I wrote an article on this a while back but the short version is that we have a policy to at a minimum document every interface, method, property and so on for every piece of code that ships. This results in a significant number of pages that are placed on MSDN and also distracts from the more useful guidance documentation.

Related to this dilemma is that developers don't know how we're organizing our documentation. There is a Redmond RDF that writers have - don't the developers know that there's a programming guide in addition to the reference? The answer being of course not! It's not the developer's fault either, it's ours. We don't clearly document how we're organizing our content. We also don't consistently organize it. In the 6 or so years that I have worked at Microsoft, the organization has fundamentally changed a number of times - this certainly does not help..

Anyways, tell me about the challenges that you have faced in learning how to develop using Microsoft products. I have been working on learning Windows Phone 7 and I have definitely seen the same issues that I heard about in addition to others. Speaking of, you can download a WP7 powered blog reader for the See Also blog, grab it in the Zune marketplace here: See Also Blog Windows Phone 7 App.

See Also

Reorganizing the Windows Desktop Developer Center...

gclassy — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:13:55 GMT

We're moving right along with updates to the developer center and it seems like a good time to share the reorganized learn structure:

The following is an intermediate revision to the TOC, there will be more to come as we keep getting better at this!

It's not perfect, it's not final... But it feels like we're taking steps in the right direction with the center. Even after we reorganize the pages, we'll need to put some serious work into the target content on the pages. Let me know what you think, do you see this as moving in the right direction?

Windows Developer Center Updates for 07.08.2011

gclassy — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:38:00 GMT

This week, we have the following changes / updates on the center:

We released a translation of the Windows Touch Developer guide in Spanish.
New changes coming soon to the developer center home and learn tabs, finally :)
The ratings control is working and we're getting your feedback!

Windows Touch Developer Guide

The Spanish subsidiary of Windows developer evangelism translated the Windows Touch Developer guide to spanish, Guía de APIs para Windows táctil. This guide contains a great summary of everything you need to know for creating touch experiences on Windows.

New changes to the center coming...

We're currently working on some of the changes we have been fighting for over the past few months. The following images are a preview of how we'll be simplifying the homepage and learn tabs:

The following changes apply to the Windows Developer center home page:

Removed links into learning content. By having all the learning content on the learn page, you can go to one place to find all of our guidance rather than try to figure out whether it's on the home page / learn page.
Removed the right rail. This was an ugly UI blemish that has been carry over from Vista design.

The following changes apply to the Windows Developer Center Learn page:

New categories of learn topics.
More comprehensive integration of the resource pages.

We'll be sure to announce when the updates go live, should be a week or two.

We hear you!!!

Feedback controls were added to the center pages last month and we're seeing feedback! Please take the time to rate our pages by clicking the stars up top and adding comments. The volume of feedback is currently small enough for us to address all feedback so here's your chance to get your inputs on the center!

See Also